Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France. Richard Moore
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the penultimate day.
‘And so to the Ventoux,’ Wiggins had written on Twitter that morning. ‘Spare a thought for the great Tom.’ Then he rode, with a photograph of Tom Simpson taped to the top tube of his bike, as though inspired by his late countryman, fighting almost the entire length – or rather height – of the mountain, from the shelter of the trees as the climb got underway, to the bald, lunar-like upper slopes, where Simpson died during the 1967 Tour.
As they ascended into the sky Wiggins was trailed off, but he fought back, only to be trailed off again, only to fight back again – a yo-yo effort that is torture at the best of times, purgatory on a climb like Mont Ventoux. Approaching the summit, and riding past the Simpson memorial statue, and past Simpson’s daughter, Joanne, who emptied her lungs to yell ‘GO BRAD!’, Wiggins dangled just off the back of the Contador-Schleck-Armstrong group, his mouth wide open, his face a picture of agony. After such an effort, and although at the start of the day the podium had seemed a possibility, his fourth place in Paris – equalling Robert Millar’s best-ever British performance in the Tour, 25 years previously – could only be seen as a glorious triumph.
Wiggins’ fourth-place finish was a game-changer for Brailsford and for Team Sky (and of course for Wiggins). Cavendish, even with his six stage wins, was all but forgotten. With Wiggins now a bona fide Tour contender, how could he not be in the new British team that was setting out the following season to try and win the Tour? And yet, how could he be, given that he was contracted to Garmin for 2010? ‘I would have to be clinically insane to sell that contract,’ said Vaughters, and he had a century’s tradition on his side. Whereas footballers routinely break contracts, and engineer moves to other clubs, such a thing doesn’t happen in cycling.
Still, the speculation couldn’t be stopped. It was not fuelled by Wiggins, who, when asked, consistently said: ‘I’m contracted to Garmin and that’s the end of it.’
At least, it wasn’t fuelled by Wiggins. Not until today, when Brailsford sits down in the Hotel Cadro Panoramica, the British team’s base for the World Championships in nearby Mendrisio, just a couple of hours after Wiggins has given an interview to Jill Douglas of the BBC. Douglas had asked him about the speculation linking him to Team Sky. And ordinarily he would have said, ‘I’m contracted to Garmin and that’s the end of it.’
But in Mendrisio, following a frustrating ride in the World Time Trial Championship, during which he suffered mechanical problems and tossed away his bike in disgust, Wiggins appears, mid-interview, to disengage the part of his brain that should filter out a remark that he might subsequently come to regret. ‘There’s a bit of a tug-of-war going on over who Bradley Wiggins will ride for at the Tour next year,’ suggests Douglas.
‘Yeah, ffffwwoooo,’ says Wiggins, affecting a half-frown, half-smile. ‘I’ll leave it to the experts. It’s unfortunate, that. I’ve had a good year this year at Garmin, but times have changed. The Tour changed everything for me really. We’ll see what happens.’
‘So,’ says Douglas, ‘the lawyers will decide?’
‘I dunno, I dunno,’ says Wiggins, rubbing his chin, biting his bottom lip, looking about as comfortable as a convict – probably because he knows what he’s about to say – yet also strangely relaxed, perhaps because he thinks that what he’s about to say will be liberating.
‘It’s a bit like trying to win the Champions League,’ he tells Douglas. ‘And to win the Champions League, you go to Manchester United. And I’m probably playing at Wigan at the moment. I’ll probably have to make that step to do it.’ (Amusingly, the next day, Wigan beat the champions-elect Chelsea.)
As Brailsford sits down, he smiles and says: ‘No questions on whether we are Man United or Wigan please.’
Now, as the season draws to a close, the British professional team – Team Sky – has never seemed more concrete. Brailsford has been working closely with the team’s first appointed directeur sportif, Scott Sunderland. Actually, Sunderland will be known as a sports director, not a directeur sportif. It is a British team, after all. Sunderland, an Australian ex-rider and previously a director with the Saxo Bank team, has been instrumental in the recruitment process, as he was, briefly, with the Cervelo TestTeam at the end of 2008, leaving to take up the position with Team Sky before a pedal had been turned in competition.
As we sit down with Brailsford in Lugano, Team Sky’s first signings have already been named. Brailsford, though, wants to talk buses. ‘Twelve months ago,’ he says, ‘driving down the motorways of Britain, I wouldn’t have been able to name you a single [make of] coach. But I guarantee you I could tell you now what they’re like, where they’re from, who made them – everything.’
He is talking about the new team bus. But as Brailsford explains the thinking that has gone into it, he offers an insight into the detail he is prepared to go into … ‘Where do you go to get a coach fitted out?’ asks Brailsford. He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘80% of teams go to two places. We went to those two places and decided it wasn’t what we want. We don’t want a Belgian bus with little tweaks. We’re getting them done by JS Fraser: they make nice buses. But we looked at what they did and thought …’ Brailsford sighs. ‘It wasn’t right. So we got everyone in the next day and looked at it again. We got all our sports scientists, our boffins in, and said: “Right, it’s a box on four wheels, how do you get a competitive advantage out of that space, pre-race and post-race? How do you make sure our guys are better recovered by the time they get to the hotel than any other team? What are you going to put in there – that’s legal?”
‘We’re spending that much money on it,’ adds Brailsford, ‘that it can’t be just a billboard – it’s got to give us an advantage.’
But if Brailsford is going to this much trouble with the team bus, what does that tell us about his approach to everything else? ‘My attitude to the bus is the same as anything else,’ he says. ‘Where you realise you don’t have expertise, you get an expert. So I hired the chief truckie at Honda [Formula One racing team], Gwilym Evans. He’s worked in F1 since 1984, starting with Benetton. Anything that didn’t walk out of the Honda warehouse was his responsibility – every vehicle. And he’s brought new ideas – new for cycling, anyway. He went to a services des courses [where bikes and equipment are stored between races and worked on by mechanics] and the first thing he said was: “Lads, paint the floor white.” The mechanics are saying, “You can’t do that, it’ll get dirty.” But Gwilym says, “That’s the point! We’re going to have a clinical environment.”
‘With the buses, we brainstormed it and figured out what matters. One of the big things is personal space. Ask the riders: they want personal space. They get in the bus in the morning, they’re in the public eye straight away, and they’re in the public eye all day riding their bike. When they come back, they want personal space. So we wanted to optimise that. On the Tour de France, you’ve got nine guys. So there are only nine seats.
‘But we’ve got serious technology on there, too. Where the toilet normally goes, we’ve got a bloody big computer server there. And everyone will have a MacBook Pro console …’
While the image of Brailsford on the motorway, casting his beady eye over passing buses, may be amusing, it seems to be typical of his approach. Nothing is too small or apparently inconsequential to escape his attention, or his quest for ‘marginal gains’. A colleague, Ned Boulting, told me of accompanying Brailsford to Quarrata, the Tuscan base of the British Cycling Academy. Brailsford was inspecting a property that had been acquired to turn into an all-purpose, all-singing, all-dancing, Quarrata base for Team Sky, with services des courses, treatment rooms and accommodation. It included a self-catering apartment. ‘And Dave was trying to work out the optimum layout for kitchen furniture,’ says Boulting. ‘He then spent a good half an hour discussing with Max Sciandri the importance of getting the access road re-surfaced. It was astonishing that he could spend so long on such a seemingly insignificant thing. But it was all about making life as easy as possible for the rider.’
There’s a problem, though. And it has nothing to do with buses, or the layout of kitchen furniture. It has to do with